The guys from Oswego cringed when they saw me coming. They were in a little circle, near a minivan in the NBT Stadium parking lot in Syracuse. They saw my notebook, the lanyard hanging around my neck.

They figured I was a team administrator, or a fire inspector, or a security guard or someone else ...

Who didn't like the look of their round red propane grill.

"Illegal in 46 of 50 states," one of the men told me, with an air of mystery.

New York, apparently, is not one of them.

There were five old friends from Oswego, including Bill Hammond and two sets of brothers: Brian and Gary Rookey, and Greg and Jim North. They've been taking the day off from their various jobs and coming to opening day for the Syracuse Chiefs since the old MacArthur Stadium was razed and the new ballpark opened, in the late 1990s.

Today's weather, they said, is just about as good as it gets: It was a little cool, sure, but there was virtually no breeze and the sun felt warm on the face. They were optimistic the Chiefs would get a big crowd, and their measure for the quality of the day goes like this:

In many years, they said, the grill was there for heat as much as it was barbecue.

Not today. At 10:30 a.m., they were among the very earliest arrivals for the 2 p.m. opener. They already had pulled out some plastic containers of meat. They put the weather, easily, in their top five Syracuse opening days of all time.

The group also offered a welcome to Dave Akkoul, a retired Syracuse firefighter who was waiting in the parking lot for his own friends to arrive. They all began talking about the Chiefs, and the new front office that's running the team, and how they'd been told new general manager Jason Smorol "really boosted morale" in a similar role with the Auburn Doubledays.

Traditionally, the guys from Oswego come to the Chiefs opener, and don't come back until next year. But if there's something special in the air today?

The round, red grill will return this season to Syracuse, they promised.

"I can't wait to see the field," said Gary Rookey, anticipating that precious first moment of the season when - no matter how old you are - the scent and sight of the green grass of the ballpark opens before you as a kind of revelation.

North, a Grateful Dead devotee who wore a faded cap bearing the name of the band Furthur, said he's been coming to games since he was a child. He vividly recalled the late Cloyd "Fats" Hollinger, the legendary restroom attendant at the old Big Mac.

So the group had a basis in baseball to begin with. They've been hanging around together since childhood, and a time came when someone said: Why don't we head down to Syracuse for opening day? The annual caravan, they said, began with the first game at the new stadium, and Gary Rookey said the group used to be even larger.

"Some of our friends have passed," Jim North said. He referred specifically to Wayne Earl and his son of the same name, both gone now, who used to be a part of this tradition. The little group was silent for a minute, the soft breeze blew ...

And they willed themselves back into the moment, because their opening day is supposed to be about friendship, bright sun, even a cold morning beer. It is about taking delight in the small things, such as the way Chiefs management put out portable toilets - which means the men wouldn't need to go wading into the cattails near the edge of the parking lot for a little privacy, the historic reason for why they always set up where they do.

"Swampy in there," said Jim North, who'd prepared by wearing a pair of boots. "Call us the Swamp Gang."